And then they would name a bunch of the men and women there and say they must be pieces of shit for supporting Aziz Ansari. Then everyone would jump on them and call them out for applauding. Questions like "Why did you applaud when Aziz Ansari's name was mentioned? Do you support his sexual misconduct?"

Are some of these guys guilty? Probably. I definitely understand this stuff is pervasive throughout the industry.

James Franco, who’d collected scores of accolades for his performance in The Disaster Artist, was snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences amid allegations of misconduct and inappropriate behavior.

The bankable actor did not receive a nomination for best actor, despite collecting a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Tommy Wiseau in the cult favorite The Room.

The allegations surfaced soon after Franco collected his Golden Globe Award while sporting a Time’s Up pin on his lapel. That night, actress Violet Paley reacted on Twitter, calling #TimesUp on the actor and describing an uncomfortable sexual encounter. Others followed with their own accounts.

Five women told the Los Angeles Times about inappropriate and sometimes sexually exploitative behavior of Franco. Four of the accusers were his former students, another described him as a mentor. The women described a nude orgy scene in which Franco removed protective plastic guards while simulating oral sex. Two women said he placed female students in uncomfortable situations in acting class.

Franco has vigorously denied the accusations, calling them “not accurate.” In an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he pledged, “If I’ve done something wrong, I will fix it. I have to.”

This is not the first time Franco’s behavior has attracted attention. He used Instagram in 2014 to openly flirt with a 17-year-old British girl he’d met outside a New York Theater, asking her age, whether she had a boyfriend and whether he should “rent a room.”

On the day of the Oscar nominations, ABC’s Good Morning America featured two of Franco’s accusers, Sarah Tither-Kaplan, 26, and Paley, 23, who told ABC News’ Amy Robach that they believe Franco has abused his power in Hollywood.

Tither-Kaplan said Franco is “not a Harvey Weinstein. He is not an unfeeling monster who has no sense of reality,” but added that doesn’t excuse his behavior, which she constitutes an abuse of power.

“He created exploitative environments for non-celebrity women on his sets and I also think James is a talented and valuable person,” Tither-Kaplan said. “It is a pyramid and at the top is rape and sexual violence and at the bottom are the other abuses of power that when they continue to happen over and over build and build and create a culture that allows the most heinous examples of sexual violence and misogyny and discrimination to happen and so if we allow any of them, we’re allowing all of them.”

Asked what Franco could do to make amends, Paley responded: “A lot of things but please just apologize.”

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- The former sports doctor who admitted molesting some of the nation's top gymnasts for years under the guise of medical treatment was sentenced Wednesday to 40 to 175 years in prison by a judge who proudly told him, ''I just signed your death warrant.''

The sentence capped a remarkable seven-day hearing in which more than 150 women and girls offered statements about being abused by Larry Nassar, a physician who was renowned for treating athletes at the sport's highest levels. Many confronted him face to face in the Michigan courtroom.

''It is my honor and privilege to sentence you. You do not deserve to walk outside a prison ever again. You have done nothing to control those urges and anywhere you walk, destruction will occur to those most vulnerable,'' Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said.

When the hearing ended, the courtroom broke into applause. Victims and prosecutors embraced at the conclusion of the grueling 16-month case.

But the anguish of the past week will have little, if any, practical effect on Nassar's fate. Before serving the Michigan sentence, the 54-year-old must first serve a 60-year federal sentence for child pornography crimes. With credit for good behavior, he could complete that sentence in about 55 years. By then, he would be more than 100 years old if still alive.

He is also scheduled to be sentenced next week on more assault convictions in Eaton County, Michigan.

A prosecutor called Nassar ''possibly the most prolific serial child sex abuser in history'' and said competitive gymnastics provided the ''perfect place'' for his crimes because victims saw him as a ''god.''

Prosecutor Angela Povilaitis also said Nassar ''perfected a built-in excuse and defense'' as a doctor, even though he was ''performing hocus-pocus medicine.''

''It takes some kind of sick perversion to not only assault a child but to do so with her parent in the room, to do so while a lineup of eager young gymnasts waited,'' Povilaitis said.

She urged people to believe young victims of sexual abuse no matter who they accuse and praised journalists, including those at the Indianapolis Star. The newspaper's 2016 investigation of how the sport's governing body handled sexual abuse allegations against coaches prompted a former gymnast to alert the paper to Nassar.

Although Nassar's work with gymnasts received the most attention, the allegations against him spanned more than a dozen sports over 25 years.

At one point, Nassar turned to the courtroom gallery to make a brief statement, saying that the victims' accounts had ''shaken me to my core.'' He said ''no words'' can describe how sorry he is.

''I will carry your words with me for the rest of my days'' he said as many of his accusers wept.

The judge then read from a letter that Nassar had written to her that raised questions about whether he was truly remorseful. The victims who packed the courtroom gasped as they heard passages that included ''Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned'' and another in which Nassar said the ''stories'' about him were fabricated.

He also defended his actions with the athletes as ''medical, not sexual.''

''I was a good doctor because my treatment worked, and those patients that are now speaking out were the same ones that praised and came back over and over, and referred family and friends to see me,'' Nassar wrote.

One of the first athletes to publicly accuse Nassar of sexual assault was the last victim to offer a statement at the hearing.

Rachael Denhollander is a Kentucky lawyer who stepped forward in 2016 after the sport's governing body, USA Gymnastics, was accused of mishandling sexual assault complaints. She said Nassar groped and fondled her when she was a 15-year-old gymnast in Michigan.

Denhollander's statements to Michigan State University police put the criminal investigation in high gear in 2016.

''You have become a man ruled by selfish and perverted desires,'' she told Nassar, who worked at the university and USA Gymnastics, which also trains Olympians.

Hours after the sentencing, Michigan lawmakers voted overwhelmingly for a nonbinding House resolution that seeks the removal of the university's president over allegations that the school missed chances to stop Nassar.

Nassar pleaded guilty to assaulting seven people in the Lansing area, including in the basement of his home and at his campus office. But the sentencing hearing was open to anyone who said they were a victim.

Accusers said he would use his ungloved hands to penetrate them, often without explanation, while they were on a table seeking help for various injuries.

The accusers, many of whom were children, said they trusted Nassar and were in denial about what was happening or were afraid to speak up. He sometimes used a sheet or his body to block the view of any parent in the room.

Several elite former gymnasts talked about how Nassar won their allegiance with candy, Olympic trinkets and encouraging words while they were under constant scrutiny from demanding coaches.

The judge praised the victims who appeared in her court, calling them ''sister survivors.'' The women included Olympians Aly Raisman, Jordyn Wieber and McKayla Maroney.

The judge also called for a broader investigation into how the abuse was allowed to go on for so long. She said justice ''requires more'' than what she can do.

The CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee soon announced an independent inquiry. Scott Blackmun said the third-party investigation will attempt to determine ''who knew what and when.''

Brooke Hylek, a gymnast who plans to compete in college, heaped scorn on Nassar.

''I cannot believe I ever trusted you, and I will never forgive you,'' she said Tuesday. ''I'm happy you will be spending the rest of your life in prison. Enjoy hell by the way.''

Actress Nicole Eggert, who has accused her former co-star Scott Baio of molesting her when she was a minor, revealed more details of her alleged harassment and abuse during her first television interview on Tuesday morning.

Speaking on “Megyn Kelly Today,” Eggert said Baio began to sexually harass and abuse her on the set of their hit ’80s sitcom “Charles in Charge” when the show started in 1986 and she was 14 years old. Eggert was a minor, and Baio is more than 11 years older than her.

“He started expressing his love for me and talking about marriage and the future,” Eggert said of when she was 14 years old. According to Eggert, the sexual abuse started before her 15th birthday when “we were at his house in his car in his garage, and he reached over and penetrated me with his finger.”

“I was very young. It was shocking,” Eggert recalled. “He was playing not only on my emotions, but my hormones and all of those things.”

Eggert pointed out the imbalanced power dynamic, noting that Baio was the boss, as the star of the show.

Eggert says the abuse continued from the ages of 14 to 17, which is when she and Baio — who, at the time, were often rumored to be a couple — first had sexual intercourse.

Eggert admits she was a willing participant, but felt uncomfortable because she was so young.

“My truth is I wasn’t ready to tell my story. For me it was always protecting the show,” Eggert said, defending herself from those who say she was consensually involved with Baio, and has spoken positively about him in previous interviews.

Baio has insisted that Eggert was 18 years old when they first had sex, and Eggert says she was 17 years old, which would legally make her a minor in the state of California.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” Eggert said when Kelly asked her if she was in fact a minor when she first had sexual intercourse with Baio, which she said he initiated. “It wasn’t a hold-me-down rape me situation, but I was 17. … I just wasn’t ready to tell my story. … It was upsetting. It wasn’t a good experience at all. … It was at my house in my spare bedroom, he laid down a towel and it happened there.”

Eggert says after she and Baio had sex, his treatment of her noticeably changed. “He didn’t treat me well on set after it happened. He was quite mean to me,” she explained.

Prior to Eggert’s “Megyn Kelly Today” interview, the actress first accused Baio on Twitter, posting, “Ask Scott Baio what happened in his garage at his house when I was a minor. Creep.”

Soon after, Baio defended himself on Facebook Live, saying Eggert’s accusations have damaged his reputation and are impacting his family. He called Eggert’s allegations “lies,” and recalled back to the garage incident — though his side of the story is that Eggert “seduced” him. “If you have a real claim, you go to the real people, not social media, where people like me get beat up,” Baio said in his Facebook Live video.

On “Megyn Kelly Today,” Eggert, seated next to her attorney Lisa Bloom, said she is exploring all legal options and is considering filing a police report.Eggert’s “Charles in Charge” castmates, Alexander Polinsky and Adam Carl, have supported the actress and have come to her defense, recalling witnessing Baio’s inappropriate behavior on set.

She has been raped. She has been sexually assaulted. She has been mangled in hot steel. She has been betrayed and gaslighted by those she trusted.

And we’re not talking about her role as the blood-spattered bride in “Kill Bill.” We’re talking about a world that is just as cutthroat, amoral, vindictive and misogynistic as any Quentin Tarantino hellscape.

We’re talking about Hollywood, where even an avenging angel has a hard time getting respect, much less bloody satisfaction.

Playing foxy Mia Wallace in 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” and ferocious Beatrix Kiddo in “Kill Bill,” Volumes 1 (2003) and 2 (2004), Thurman was the lissome goddess in the creation myth of Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino. The Miramax troika was the ultimate in indie cool. A spellbound Tarantino often described his auteur-muse relationship with Thurman — who helped him conceive the idea of the bloody bride — as an Alfred Hitchcock-Ingrid Bergman legend. (With a foot fetish thrown in.) But beneath the glistening Oscar gold, there was a dark undercurrent that twisted the triangle.“Pulp Fiction” made Weinstein rich and respected, and Thurman says he introduced her to President Barack Obama at a fund-raiser as the reason he had his house.

“The complicated feeling I have about Harvey is how bad I feel about all the women that were attacked after I was,” she told me one recent night, looking anguished in her elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side, as she vaped tobacco, sipped white wine and fed empty pizza boxes into the fireplace.

“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”

Thurman stresses that Creative Artists Agency, her former agency, was connected to Weinstein’s predatory behavior. It has since issued a public apology. “I stand as both a person who was subjected to it and a person who was then also part of the cloud cover, so that’s a super weird split to have,” she says.

She talks mordantly about “the power from ‘Pulp,’” and reminds me that it’s in the Library of Congress, part of the American narrative.

“I used the word ‘anger’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth,” she says now. “I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”

By Thanksgiving, Thurman had begun to unsheathe her Hattori Hanzo, Instagramming a screen shot of her “roaring rampage of revenge” monologue and wishing everyone a happy holiday, “(Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators — I’m glad it’s going slowly — you don’t deserve a bullet) — stay tuned.”

Stretching out her lanky frame on a brown velvet couch in front of the fire, Thurman tells her story, with occasional interruptions from her 5-year-old daughter with her ex, financier Arpad Busson. Luna is in her pj’s, munching on a raw cucumber. Her two older kids with Ethan Hawke, Maya, an actress, and Levon, a high school student, also drop by.

In interviews over the years, Thurman has offered a Zen outlook — even when talking about her painful breakup from Hawke. (She had a brief first marriage to Gary Oldman.) Her hall features a large golden Buddha from her parents in Woodstock; her father, Robert Thurman, is a Buddhist professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia who thinks Uma is a reincarnated goddess.

But beneath that reserve and golden aura, she has learned to be a street fighter.

She says when she was 16, living in a studio apartment in Manhattan and starting her movie career, she went to a club one winter night and met an actor, nearly 20 years older, who coerced her afterward when they went to his Greenwich Village brownstone for a nightcap.

“I was ultimately compliant,” she remembers. “I tried to say no, I cried, I did everything I could do. He told me the door was locked but I never ran over and tried the knob. When I got home, I remember I stood in front of the mirror and I looked at my hands and I was so mad at them for not being bloody or bruised. Something like that tunes the dial one way or another, right? You become more compliant or less compliant, and I think I became less compliant.”

Thurman got to know Weinstein and his first wife, Eve, in the afterglow of “Pulp Fiction.” “I knew him pretty well before he attacked me,” she said. “He used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me. It possibly made me overlook warning signs. This was my champion. I was never any kind of studio darling. He had a chokehold on the type of films and directors that were right for me.”

Things soon went off-kilter in a meeting in his Paris hotel room. “It went right over my head,” she says. They were arguing about a script when the bathrobe came out.

“I didn’t feel threatened,” she recalls. “I thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle.”

He told her to follow him down a hall — there were always, she says, “vestibules within corridors within chambers” — so they could keep talking. “Then I followed him through a door and it was a steam room. And I was standing there in my full black leather outfit — boots, pants, jacket. And it was so hot and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, what are you doing?’ And he was getting very flustered and mad and he jumped up and ran out.”

The first “attack,” she says, came not long after in Weinstein’s suite at the Savoy Hotel in London. “It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”

She was staying in Fulham with her friend, Ilona Herman, Robert De Niro’s longtime makeup artist, who later worked with Thurman on “Kill Bill.”

“The next day to her house arrived a 26-inch-wide vulgar bunch of roses,” Thurman says. “They were yellow. And I opened the note like it was a soiled diaper and it just said, ‘You have great instincts.’” Then, she says, Weinstein’s assistants started calling again to talk about projects.

She thought she could confront him and clear it up, but she took Herman with her and asked Weinstein to meet her in the Savoy bar. The assistants had their own special choreography to lure actresses into the spider’s web and they pressured Thurman, putting Weinstein on the phone to again say it was a misunderstanding and “we have so many projects together.” Finally she agreed to go upstairs, while Herman waited on a settee outside the elevators.

Once the assistants vanished, Thurman says, she warned Weinstein, “If you do what you did to me to other people you will lose your career, your reputation and your family, I promise you.” Her memory of the incident abruptly stops there.

Through a representative, Weinstein, who is in therapy in Arizona, agreed that “she very well could have said this.”

Downstairs, Herman was getting nervous. “It seemed to take forever,” the friend told me. Finally, the elevator doors opened and Thurman walked out. “She was very disheveled and so upset and had this blank look,” Herman recalled. “Her eyes were crazy and she was totally out of control. I shoveled her into the taxi and we went home to my house. She was really shaking.” Herman said that when the actress was able to talk again, she revealed that Weinstein had threatened to derail her career.

Through a spokesperson, Weinstein denied ever threatening her prospects and said that he thought she was “a brilliant actress.” He acknowledged her account of the episodes but said that up until the Paris steam room, they had had “a flirtatious and fun working relationship.”

“Mr. Weinstein acknowledges making a pass at Ms. Thurman in England after misreading her signals in Paris,” the statement said. “He immediately apologized.”

Thurman says that, even though she was in the middle of a run of Miramax projects, she privately regarded Weinstein as an enemy after that. One top Hollywood executive who knew them both said the work relationship continued but that basically, “She didn’t give him the time of day.”

Thurman says that she could tolerate the mogul in supervised environments and that she assumed she had “aged out of the window of his assault range.”

She attended the party he had in SoHo in September for Tarantino’s engagement to Daniella Pick, an Israeli singer. In response to queries about Thurman’s revelations, Weinstein sent along six pictures of chummy photos of the two of them at premieres and parties over the years.

And that brings us to “the Quentin of it all,” as Thurman calls it. The animosity between Weinstein and Thurman infected her creative partnership with Tarantino.

Married to Hawke and with a baby daughter and a son on the way, Thurman went to the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. She says Tarantino noticed after a dinner that she was skittish around Weinstein, which was a problem, since they were all about to make “Kill Bill.” She says she reminded Tarantino that she had already told him about the Savoy incident, but “he probably dismissed it like ‘Oh, poor Harvey, trying to get girls he can’t have,’ whatever he told himself, who knows?” But she reminded him again and “the penny dropped for him. He confronted Harvey.”

Later, by the pool under the Cypress trees at the luxurious Hotel du Cap, Thurman recalls, Weinstein said he was hurt and surprised by her accusations. She then firmly reiterated what happened in London. “At some point, his eyes changed and he went from aggressive to ashamed,” she says, and he offered her an apology with many of the sentiments he would trot out about 16 years later when the walls caved in.

Weinstein confirmed Friday that he apologized, an unusual admission from him, which spurred Thurman to wryly note, “His therapy must be working.”

Since the revelations about Weinstein became public last fall, Thurman has been reliving her encounters with him — and a gruesome episode on location for “Kill Bill” in Mexico made her feel as blindsided as the bride and as determined to get her due, no matter how long it took.

With four days left, after nine months of shooting the sadistic saga, Thurman was asked to do something that made her draw the line.

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

But she had been led to believe by a teamster, she says, that the car, which had been reconfigured from a stick shift to an automatic, might not be working that well.

She says she insisted that she didn’t feel comfortable operating the car and would prefer a stunt person to do it. Producers say they do not recall her objecting.

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’

But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thurman then shows me the footage that she says has taken her 15 years to get. “Solving my own Nancy Drew mystery,” she says.

It’s from the point of view of a camera mounted to the back of the Karmann Ghia. It’s frightening to watch Thurman wrestle with the car, as it drifts off the road and smashes into a palm tree, her contorted torso heaving helplessly until crew members appear in the frame to pull her out of the wreckage. Tarantino leans in and Thurman flashes a relieved smile when she realizes that she can briefly stand.

Uma Thurman said she didn't want to drive this car. She said she had been warned that there were issues with it. She felt she had to do it anyway. It took her some 15 years to get footage of the crash.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Even though their marriage was spiraling apart, Hawke immediately left the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to fly to his wife’s side.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he told me. He said he told Tarantino, “Hey, man, she is great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”

Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.

“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”

(Tarantino aficionados spy an echo of Thurman’s crash in his 2007 movie, “Death Proof,” produced by Weinstein and starring Thurman’s stunt double, Zoë Bell. Young women, including a blond Rose McGowan, die in myriad ways, including by slamming into a windshield.)

As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.

“When they turned on me after the accident,” she says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”

Thurman says that in “Kill Bill,” Tarantino had done the honors with some of the sadistic flourishes himself, spitting in her face in the scene where Michael Madsen is seen on screen doing it and choking her with a chain in the scene where a teenager named Gogo is on screen doing it.

“Harvey assaulted me but that didn’t kill me,” she says. “What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?” She says she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.

“Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you ‘in love’ with you. It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.”

I was wondering how long it'd take Uma to tell her story and it explains why Kill Bill was the end of her professional relationship with Tarantino, I never knew any of that or about the damage she sustained from the KB accident. I'm very disappointed in QT, I always thought he was better than that....

"At no point was I notified or consulted about Ms. Thurman driving a car on camera that day," says coordinator Keith Adams.

The stunt coordinator on the Kill Bill movies has broken his silence on a disturbing recent allegation made by Uma Thurman regarding a crash during production that left her injured.Coordinator Keith Adams told The Hollywood Reporter that he and his entire department were kept off set the day Thurman was allegedly pressured by director Quentin Tarantino to drive a rattrap convertible down a curved, sandy Mexican road at 40 mph, resulting in a crash that gave her a concussion, damaged her knees and could have caused worse injuries.

"No stunts of any kind were scheduled for the day of Ms. Thurman's accident," states Adams in an email to THR. "All of the stunt department was put on hold and no one from the stunt department was called to set. At no point was I notified or consulted about Ms. Thurman driving a car on camera that day."

"Had I been involved," Adams continues, "I would have insisted not only on putting a professional driver behind the wheel but also insuring that the car itself was road-worthy and safe."

Adams — an experienced coordinator with a particular expertise in automotive work, according to veteran stunt performer and coordinator Andy Armstrong — did not say whether he thought his department was intentionally held at bay to facilitate having an actor perform driving maneuvers. It was not immediately clear who prepared the call sheet that day and who decided to idle the stunt department. Tarantino told Deadline that "none of us ever considered it a stunt. It was just driving."

"The circumstances of this event were negligent to the point of criminality," said Thurman in an Instagram post Monday. "I do not believe though with malicious intent." (After the crash came a cover-up which "did have malicious intent," she wrote, naming three production executives.)

It may have been "just driving" to Tarantino, but performers' union SAG-AFTRA said in a statement that it "sounds like a stunt and would be a likely safety violation."

The new statement from the stunt coordinator underscores Thurman's description of the 1973 Karmann Ghia as a profound hazard. "That was a deathbox," she told Maureen Dowd for a New York Times story published on Feb. 3 that kicked off a round of speculation about the incident. Thurman explained to the writer that "the seat wasn't screwed down properly" and that she'd been told the vintage convertible had been converted from stick shift to automatic.

The car's allegedly sad shape came as no surprise to Melissa Stubbs, also a veteran stunt performer and coordinator. "A picture car is usually a piece of shit," she told THR bluntly, using industry argot for vehicles that appear onscreen.

Armstrong agreed, noting that non-stunt picture cars are generally towed on flatbed "process trailers" while being filmed, making it easier to rig lights and cameras and allowing an actor to give the illusion of driving without anyone being endangered. For that reason, Armstrong indicated, production personnel focus on making a picture car look good onscreen, and not necessarily on making it safely drivable.

In addition, video of the crash indicates that the then-30-year-old ragtop was without roll bars, shoulder belts or head restraints. Thurman's head whips backward and hangs over the low seat back after the crash. It's unclear whether there was a lap belt or whether Thurman was wearing it if there was.

"That could have been a death by decapitation," veteran coordinator Armstrong said. "The car could easily have rolled over [or] the camera could have flown forward. It was irresponsibility on a mega level."

Many people share safety duties on set: the producers (lead producer Lawrence Bender apologized Wednesday and also said he "never hid anything"), the director (Thurman has described Tarantino as regretful and remorseful), the 1st assistant director (although this may be less clear in a non-DGA film like Kill Bill) — and, of course, the stunt coordinator.

"On any set, my number one priority and the priority of any stunt coordinator is the safety of the cast and crew," said Adams. "For a stunt coordinator to do their job properly, they must be involved at every step of the process and given the opportunity to intervene when changes to the shoot are made."

"Unfortunately," he added, "I did not have that opportunity in this case."

While much of the country remains angered and revolted by the photograph of a woman’s bruised face, President Donald Trump is worrying about black eyes on the reputations of men whose “lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation.”

Trump didn’t name names, though two male White House staffers have resigned or been fired in as many days over allegations of beating their wives. White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter resigned Wednesday after allegations surfaced of domestic abuse against his two ex-wives, one of whom, Colbie Holderness, released a photograph of herself with the black eye she says Porter gave her.

And on Friday, White House speechwriter David Sorensen quit after his ex-wife went public with allegations that included, among other things, that he once ran over her foot with a car and stubbed out a cigarette on her hand.

Porter and Sorensen have denied the charges.

Porter had been operating in the White House without top security clearance since the FBI had deemed the abuse allegations credible. Trump said yesterday that he wished Porter well in his career.

Trump’s morning tweet lamented not even abuse in general but rather on the impact of allegations and the seeming lack of due process.

“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation,” Trump tweeted. “Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused — life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

Trump didn’t explain how a “mere allegation” could also be “true,” or what difference it makes whether the allegations are “old” or “new.”

As for “no recovery for someone falsely accused” – and that “life and career are gone” – Trump ignores his rise to the presidency and a new political career in the wake of his own sexual harassment and abuse allegations, which he says are false.

Trump continued the victim theme in two later tweets today, addressing the controversy over the Nunes Memo and Steele Dossier by quoting a conservative activist today on Fox News who claimed that Trump was “victimized by the Obama Administration.”

Trump’s two-part tweet reads (in full):

“My view is that not only has Trump been vindicated in the last several weeks about the mishandling of the Dossier and the lies about the Clinton/DNC Dossier, it shows that he’s been victimized. He’s been victimized by the Obama Administration who were using all sorts of agencies, not just the FBI & DOJ, now the State Department to dig up dirt on him in the days leading up to the Election. Comey had conversations with Donald Trump, which I don’t believe were accurate…he leaked information (corrupt).” Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch on @FoxNews

Here are today’s presidential tweets thus far:

Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018

“My view is that not only has Trump been vindicated in the last several weeks about the mishandling of the Dossier and the lies about the Clinton/DNC Dossier, it shows that he’s been victimized. He’s been victimized by the Obama Administration who were using all sorts of…….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018

….agencies, not just the FBI & DOJ, now the State Department to dig up dirt on him in the days leading up to the Election. Comey had conversations with Donald Trump, which I don’t believe were accurate…he leaked information (corrupt).” Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch on @FoxNews— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018

Good Will Hunting star Minnie Driver has stepped down from her role as an ambassador to charity Oxfam after it became embroiled in a major scandal.

It has emerged that a number of people working for the charity paid vulnerable people for sex while working in crisis-hit overseas countries. The charity has been accused of concealing the findings of an inquiry into these allegations, focused around its work delivering aid to Haiti in 2011. Oxfam’s Deputy Chief Executive, Penny Lawrence, has resigned over the charity’s handling of the situation.

Driver, who has worked with Oxfam for over 20 years and is one of its main celebrity ambassadors, travelling to countries such as Cambodia and Thailand in her role, is the first major star to distance themselves from the charity.

Grosse Pointe Blank star Driver, who is currently starring in ABC’s Speechless, said that she would continue to work against “social and economic injustice”.

“I certainly will not let the abhorrent mistakes of a troubling organisation stop me or anyone else from working with good people in this space to support a population of human beings around the world that needs our help,” she said.

“All I can tell you about this awful revelation about Oxfam is that I am devastated. Devastated for the women who were used by people sent there to help them, devastated by the response of an organization that I have been raising awareness for since I was 9 years old,” she added.

Ok now this is just ridiculous. Some asshole is claiming sexual assault 20 years later because when he was 16 he had the gorgeous 26 year old Melrose Place star Jamie Lunar go down on him?????????? This feels more like bragging than a legit claim because that's exactly what it is. I don't know what you guys were doing at 16 but that was not what I would ever have called rape and it's like he's using the MeToo campaign to brag about it.

Things are getting way out of hand here. It seems like any woman that's every been hit on by a sleazy guy in the last 50 years is filing a sexual harassment lawsuit totally overshadowing the actual rape victims and then you get cases like what happened with Azis Ansari being accused after bad sex and now from the opposite side of the spectrum it's Jamie Luner getting accused of mouth rape after 20 years? Right because that 100 lb beautiful 26 year old woman aka the monster in question must have fed him alcohol and then forced him to stand there while she performed horrific acts of oral sex on him. I hope that with time and therapy he was able to overcome the nightmare and trauma he suffered at her hands. Now he goes to the cops and says "A famous 90s tv celebrity gave me head and it ruined my life!!!!"

Things are getting way out of hand here. It seems like any woman that's every been hit on by a sleazy guy in the last 50 years is filing a sexual harassment lawsuit totally overshadowing the actual rape victims and then you get cases like what happened with Azis Ansari being accused after bad sex and now from the opposite side of the spectrum it's Jamie Luner getting accused of mouth rape after 20 years? Right because that 100 lb beautiful 26 year old woman aka the monster in question must have fed him alcohol and then forced him to stand there while she performed horrific acts of oral sex on him. I hope that with time and therapy he was able to overcome the nightmare and trauma he suffered at her hands. Now he goes to the cops and says "A famous 90s tv celebrity gave me head and it ruined my life!!!!"

Pathetic...

That will pale in comparison to the absolute shit-flogging his friends will put on him now. If he has any, which at this point I have to question, because what friend would let him come forward - unless the guy turned out to be gay, and his current partner is a complete fucking arsehole.

@Rusty wrote:That will pale in comparison to the absolute shit-flogging his friends will put on him now. If he has any, which at this point I have to question, because what friend would let him come forward - unless the guy turned out to be gay, and his current partner is a complete fucking arsehole.

If that were my friend, I'd beat the hell out of him and leave him unconscious in an alley.

Then again, I'd never be friends with a man who said a woman raped him because she gave him head at 16. If that's the case I was assaulted a lot as a teen....

The man who recently accused former “Melrose Place” star Jamie Luner of performing oral sex on him when he was a teen now says the actress also drugged him and taped the sexual act — accusations she says have “no merit.”

Anthony Oliver told TMZ he met Luner — who played Lexi Sterling on the ’90s drama — at a party she threw at her home in Los Angeles in 1998 that he attended with his brother.

Oliver — then 16 — says Luner — then around 26 — provided him with alcohol and drugs before they went to a bedroom with a third unidentified person. He says this other person recorded Luner while she performed oral sex on Oliver.

Oliver told Page Six he accepted both whiskey and methamphetamines from Luner.

“I was not in the right state of mind,” Oliver told the outlet.

“There is absolutely no merit to these allegations, and in our opinion, this is a blatant attempt at extortion,” Luner’s manager tells TheWrap.

According to TMZ, Oliver says he spoke to his parents about the alleged incident back in 1998. and filed a police report with the Los Angeles Police Department last month. Oliver told TMZ he reported the encounter after his therapist, who is treating him for alcoholism, suggested he come forward.

@WyldeMan wrote:According to TMZ, Oliver says he spoke to his parents about the alleged incident back in 1998. and filed a police report with the Los Angeles Police Department last month. Oliver told TMZ he reported the encounter after his therapist, who is treating him for alcoholism, suggested he come forward.

And there it is.

"Since you're a fuckwit that I'm making money from, may I suggest you make this claim to try and make money, so I can make more money from you".

@WyldeMan wrote:According to TMZ, Oliver says he spoke to his parents about the alleged incident back in 1998. and filed a police report with the Los Angeles Police Department last month. Oliver told TMZ he reported the encounter after his therapist, who is treating him for alcoholism, suggested he come forward.

And there it is.

"Since you're a fuckwit that I'm making money from, may I suggest you make this claim to try and make money, so I can make more money from you".

Yup, that's how I took it. Therapy is probably the most useless thing one can do, nobody's life has ever improved from droning on endlessly about the past. It doesn't make you better, it just buys your doctor another boat and a new kitchen remodel before you inevitably eat your gun in a crumpled mess of neurotic tears. I just don't give a fuck about anything, so I'm awesome and I could care less about someone else's problems but a doctor did once tell me I was very Apathetic and almost certainly a sociopath but I took nothing from that.

So.... Getting a BJ from a hot 26-year-old woman drove him to depression and alcoholism. Yea, he's definitely a homo.

I really hope his friends are making his life miserable. I would ride the shit out of him about that. Like all day long. He wouldn't ever want to hang out with me again because the whole time I'd just make fun of him.

@joey con carne wrote:So.... Getting a BJ from a hot 26-year-old woman drove him to depression and alcoholism. Yea, he's definitely a homo.

I really hope his friends are making his life miserable. I would ride the shit out of him about that. Like all day long. He wouldn't ever want to hang out with me again because the whole time I'd just make fun of him.

Maybe the fact that he's in therapy paying for the privilege of crying like a little bitch everyday is why he can't get over his "rape".

I'd have just thanked her for the experience and asked for a copy of that tape.

TV Actress Allison Mack is named as CC1 in the federal complaint against Keith Raniere.

She is expected to be arrested shortly, sources say.

Photo above Allison Mack in Mexico at the scene of Keith Raniere’s arrest. It is believed her arrest is imminent for sex trafficking.

As of yesterday, Mack was in Mexico, living with Raniere.

Raniere himself was arrested yesterday by Federal Police in Mexico and immediately extradited to the USA.

It is believed the actress, who appeared in the hit TV show ‘Smallville’, will face sex trafficking charges.

Mack, 34, has been a member of NXIVM since 2006. Sources say she gave up her acting career at the direction of NXIVM leader Keith Raniere aka ‘Vanguard’. She works closely with NXIVM leader Clare Bronfman, an heir to the Seagram’s fortune.

Raniere, Bronfman and Mack are believed to have conspired to form and fund the brutal ‘master-slave cult’, which depends on blackmail to keep women in slavery.

Bronfman allegedly financed the entire operation. There has been no comment from the Bronfman family or their trustees.

The women who were coerced into slavery were branded on their pubic region with a hot iron in an excruciatingly painful procedure with the initials of Raniere and Allison Mack.

@joey con carne wrote:I didn't think anything was going to actually happen with Allison Mack and Keith Raniere. I figured it was all just going to go away.

This is pretty good. I hope she gets busted and they all go to prison if the sex trafficking accusations are true.

Kristin Kreuk already threw Allison Mack under the bus. If all this stuff is true it is really fucked up.

Kreuk also "attended meetings" but had "minimal contact" and never saw anything bad. Sure I'll buy that, except her best friend Allison Mack was the head recruiter.....So apparently in Kruek's world, joining a sex cult and branding your naughty bits with your friend's initials these days is "attending meetings".

Mack seems to have gotten up to some supremely shady shit. Some of the ladies that left the cult discussed Allison's nickname as being "Pimp Mack" since she was the main recruiter and that not only did they brand them, they also used blackmail to force them into joining and staying.

I just read that one of the other actresses in Mexico with Allison and Keith during the arrest was Nicki Clyne, who played one of my favorite character on BSG.

The four women with him were so disillusion that if you watch the video you see they actually got in a high speed chase with the cops after they took him away, the women chased him down like they were gonna stop the machine gun wielding Mexican police.................

However, I don't think Raniere will do any time. He set this all up perfectly, his name isn't on anything and these people are willing slaves who turned in their own blackmail folders to prevent them from leaving. Allison Mack will go down as a martyr for his cause while he skates off to another country with the reaming harem members which was more than 50 at last public count and they'll be ready to recruit and start fresh in another country.

@joey con carne wrote:I didn't think anything was going to actually happen with Allison Mack and Keith Raniere. I figured it was all just going to go away.

This is pretty good. I hope she gets busted and they all go to prison if the sex trafficking accusations are true.

Kristin Kreuk already threw Allison Mack under the bus. If all this stuff is true it is really fucked up.

Kreuk also "attended meetings" but had "minimal contact" and never saw anything bad. Sure I'll buy that, except her best friend Allison Mack was the head recruiter.....So apparently in Kruek's world, joining a sex cult and branding your naughty bits with your friend's initials these days is "attending meetings".

Mack seems to have gotten up to some supremely shady shit. Some of the ladies that left the cult discussed Allison's nickname as being "Pimp Mack" since she was the main recruiter and that not only did they brand them, they also used blackmail to force them into joining and staying.

I just read that one of the other actresses in Mexico with Allison and Keith during the arrest was Nicki Clyne, who played one of my favorite character on BSG.

The four women with him were so disillusion that if you watch the video you see they actually got in a high speed chase with the cops after they took him away, the women chased him down like they were gonna stop the machine gun wielding Mexican police.................

However, I don't think Raniere will do any time. He set this all up perfectly, his name isn't on anything and these people are willing slaves who turned in their own blackmail folders to prevent them from leaving. Allison Mack will go down as a martyr for his cause while he skates off to another country with the reaming harem members which was more than 50 at last public count and they'll be ready to recruit and start fresh in another country.

That is fucked up. Kristin seems like such a sweetheart that I don't think she'd have any involvement in this. As mentioned, probably all after she left. I'm curious to see what the other Smallville cast mates have to say about this.

@UltimateMarvel wrote:That is fucked up. Kristin seems like such a sweetheart that I don't think she'd have any involvement in this. As mentioned, probably all after she left. I'm curious to see what the other Smallville cast mates have to say about this.

She said she only left five years ago but she and Allison were recruited because of their "celebrity" so it had to have been when Smallville was still popular.

Former Silicon Valley star T.J. Miller has been charged with calling in a false bomb threat from an Amtrak train, federal authorities say.

Miller was arrested Monday night at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York. He was charged in a federal criminal complaint “with intentionally conveying to law enforcement false information about an explosive device on a train traveling to Connecticut,” according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.

Miller appeared today before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey A. Meyer in New Haven and was released on a $100,000 bond. The charge carries a maximum term of five years in prison.

According to federal prosecutors, on March 18, Miller called a 911 dispatcher in New Jersey and reported that he was on Amtrak Train 2256 traveling from Washington, D.C., toward Penn Station in New York City, and that a female passenger “has a bomb in her bag.” Miller described the woman as having brown hair and a scarf. Amtrak officials stopped the train at Green’s Farms Station in Westport, Connecticut. Passengers were taken off the train and bomb squad members did a search but no explosive device or materials were found.

The complaint goes on to allege an investigator contacted Miller by phone. This time Miller described the woman differently as having red hair and a red scarf and carrying a “black bag carry-on suitcase with a handle.” He said she kept checking her bag without taking anything out; kept asking the First Class attendant what the next stop was, and seemed to want to get off the train and leave her bag behind.

According to the complaint, the officer detected slurring in Miller’s voice and asked if he had consumed alcohol that day. Miller replied that he had consumed “one glass of red wine.” Asked if he suffered from mental illness, Miller replied “no, absolutely not. This is the first time I’ve ever made a call like this before. I am worried for everyone on that train. Someone has to check that lady out.”

Investigators later determined that Miller had actually been traveling on a different train than he initially reported. An attendant from the First Class car where Miller had been sitting said Miller appeared intoxicated when he boarded in Washington, and consumed multiple drinks on the train and was removed in New York because of intoxication. The attendant also told investigators Miller had been involved in hostile exchanges with a woman who was sitting in a different row from him in the First Class car.

The complaint further alleges that Miller, motivated by a grudge against the subject female, called 911 to relay false information about a suspected bomb on the train, and continued to convey false information to investigators while the public safety response was ongoing.

TJ called in a bomb threat because of a grudge against the woman he led the police to believe was a suspect? Daaaamn, it's as if the rape allegations weren't already proof that he was fucked up and he decided he missed the headlines so he did this?